Breq (talking about Anaander Mianaai):
You humans have a saying. An eye for an eye; a life for a life. Well she owes me thousands of lives and I plan to collect.
That is the best description of Steve I have ever seen
I was always so confused about if Joss Whedon had seen The First Avenger. Because Steve swears in the movie. Not like hard, its a PG-13 family movie, but he does swear.
I think Joss Whedon falls into the same trap as bad fic writer, where he thinks Steve is a farmer from 1950s Kansas instead of Irish Catholic kid from 1920s Brooklyn.
Steve Rogers is 400 pounds of righteous kickass in a 100 pound body and by using the serum the army found room for only most of it.
he thinks Steve is a farmer from 1950s Kansas instead of Irish Catholic kid from 1920s Brooklyn.
this is it. this is the description for how steve is so often mischaracterized.
My grandpa was born in a Brooklyn tenement in 1917. He was five-foot-nothing, fond of bare-knuckle boxing and once flipped my 6′1″ uncle to make a point. Enlisted in Dec 1941, got shot and blown up and turned down a medical discharge twice, but took the bronze star (which he tossed in the back of his closet). He cursed in two languages and told ribald stories about french prostitutes. He cared deeply about doing what was right even at personal cost, and would give you the shirt off his back. He learned how to use a computer just to spite my father telling him he was too old. He climbed on his roof at 87 to fix the chimney. At 89 he threatened to kick my husband’s ass if he broke my heart, and my husband was like “I genuinely believed him and was kind of scared.” When he died, people filled the largest room in the funeral home, then the line stretched down the hall, out the door, and down the sidewalk. I heard dozens and dozens of stories that could all be summed up as “Here’s how he helped/stood up for me” and/or “I really thought he was going to get himself killed with that”. My last surviving great-uncle said he was best summed up with “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”
So me and @alexkablob watched Rogue One and I think I can put into words what resonates so much this time. I realize other people have said this already more eloquently than me but…
While everyone I’ve seen agrees that R1 is fucking gorgeous, the main thing I’ve seen from people who don’t personally like it is that the total party kill is too dark, too depressing, it doesn’t feel like Star Wars exactly; that Star Wars is about hope and good triumphing over evil despite the odds. And look, Rogue One is heavy. You don’t have to personally like that, that’s fair.
But there is one thing that I have to contest. Because….Rogue One is about hope.
The good guys win.
They win. They pass hope like a baton, bloody fingers to sweaty palms, sprinting forward and trusting that someone will manage to slip it into their hand before it’s too late.
The message of Rogue One, the reason I adore it for its quietly unflinching look at sacrifice, isn’t the dark-and-gritty People Die In War, Don’t Be Naive. Its message is…look. Look at humanity. Look at what we do, what we are capable of. The beauty of hope, the love and the faith we have for one another. Look at what courage and compassion accomplish. All the hatred, all the brute force in the galaxy can’t match that simple, silent strength. The Empire fails.
A dark, gritty movie would be: the Empire wins. Or the Rebellion wins but the cost was too high, it wasn’t worth it. Rogue One says, yes, it was.
That soft rising music over the entire end of that relay race, from the moment the plans beam out. It’s quiet, and sad, and solemn–and triumphant.
It says: it’s over. It’s done. It’s all right. It’s all right. It’s all right. You’ve done enough. Breathe. This was worth it.
Oh my god THAT’s why she’s willing to sacrifice her crew, because she’s tried any variation of telling them, of asking their help, and there’s always somehow a weak link, they’re not good at secrets, at acting. They don’t even come away from the Citadel, or her crew is suddenly replaced by Joe, or she’s taken off the War Rig, or– In desperation she tries not telling them one time, and it’s gut-wrenching, but then she gets much further, and now she has to get them killed over and over again, punch Ace off of her running board like he’s one of the Wretched over and over again–
She only ever reaches the other Vuvalini once, on their final run, which is why it was so crushing when she found out that there were only a few left, and that her home was gone. The run through we saw was the furthest she ever got, after hundreds of times watching her crew and the sisters die in different ways. Maybe she even killed Max many times before, or left him to die in the desert.
